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Comment by makerops | Hacker News Reader

Hey,

What was the response time of the old firm? What are the stacks of the servers vs workstations? How many hours per week did 4k/mo get you?

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1. Very Fast, usually less than 15 minutes (less than 5 to an emergency) during the day. And within 10 or so minutes for an escalation (from monitoring or person) 24/7.

2. Two server stacks (co-location and in house). ~ 8 or so physical servers each place. Workstations are about 50 with most being very simple machines in the manufacturing area.

3. It was a flat fee. My guess is it was ~

What is the differentiation between the colo servers, and the in-house? I am imagining that everything on site, ran the day to day "office" stuff (email, active directory etc); and the colo was something else?

Colo is for customer facing systems (we sell software as a service). In house is for helping run the factory and staging / dev systems version of colo systems.

If it were me, I'd try to compartmentalize the factory/day to day IT stuff, and the dev + colo systems. Having a basic IT shop to handle printers, workstations etc, and a specialist or freelancer to handle the dev + colo work, would be my suggestion. Have you looked at retainers? I was thinking about starting a retainer based IT consultancy (10 hours a month for 1250$ w/ 4 hour response time or something similar). I am curious to see what your thoughts are.

Yeah. That is similar to my 3rd thought and very similar to one of the programmer's thoughts. Makes a lot of sense since it would be hard to find the person who wanted to do the day in and day out 'fix the printer' stuff and also have the skills for the more high end stuff.

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